AUSTIN - Using teddy bears, bathing suits and puppets as tools, students as young as 5 years old could be required to undergo annual sexual assault protection training in school as a growing number of children fall prey to sexual offenders.

The Texas House last week approved the idea, which comes as sexual assaults against children have risen to a high of 51,000 allegations in the last fiscal year, along with increased reports of human trafficking and record numbers of teachers accused of having inappropriate relationships with students.

"It's unbelievably sick when you think about what's happening in society, my friends," said Rep. Tan Parker, a Republican from Flower Mound.

In a move to counter that trend, the Texas House passed House Bill 1342, a bill supported by anti-sexual assault groups around the state that say children should be learning in school to say no to unwanted touch and feel empowered to tell a teacher or parent when someone steps over the line. Action is pending in the Senate, which would have to approve the measure before it goes to the governor's office for his consideration.

The annual trainings are much like "stranger danger" lessons, experts say, although 95 percent of sexually abused children were assaulted by someone they knew, such as a relative or a neighbor.

"It's soul murder," said Madeline McClure, a former therapist who said she counseled victims as young as 2 years old as they worked through sexual assault trauma.

Now the president and CEO of Tex Protects, which focuses on child abuse and prevention, McClure is pushing the bill, which would allow the Texas Education Agency to select age-appropriate researched-based curriculum counselors would present to students every year from kindergarten to 12th grade.

For example, one second grade lesson would teach students the difference between safe touch, like a wanted hug, and an unsafe touch, like a pinch, and an unwanted touch, like covering someone's eyes in an unwanted game of Guess Who.

"How do you talk about that to kids? We have puppets," said Sylvia Orozco-Joseph, national director of WHO, or We Help Ourselves, and director of the Adolescent Symposium of Texas.

'Think their way out'

WHO offers curriculum in use in Texas, including the Houston area in Cypress-Fairbanks, Spring and Fort Bend independent school districts. The lessons, which are broken up into different age levels, rely on playing out scenarios, like analyzing why one of three boys are opposed to visiting a teacher's house, or what to do when the father of a child an eighth grader baby-sits puts his hand on her shoulder in the car before driving her home.

"That's what we want kids to do - to think their way out of a situation," said Orozco-Joseph, who said high school lessons include dramatizations about date rape and teen dating violence.

In the lower grades, she uses puppets, like Kimberly Koala, who helps kids talk about not keeping secrets from adults, and Billy Brown Bear, who talks about touch.

The state would have the power to review curriculum like this and other programs that rely on animated video lessons or scripted instruction for school districts to choose.

"I have really mixed feelings about it," said Sarah Becker, an active parent at Houston Independent School District, after putting her 6, 4 and 2-year-old children to bed. "I would argue we should be teaching people not to rape people, not teaching people how to avoid it."

HISD does not provide this kind of training yet and declined to comment for this story. But to Becker, requiring high school students learn how to avoid sexual assault equates to sex education, which is a good thing, and needs to be more comprehensive.

Not sex education

Lawmakers in the House sent the bill to the Senate on a 128-15 vote last week, but not before stripping language that referenced combating child pregnancy as part of the purpose to make the bill more palatable to Republicans.

"This is not about sexual education training," said Parker, who sponsored the bill. "That is not what this is; not at all, no way, shape or form. It is exclusively training to prevent child sexual abuse. Period."

Roughly 10,000 girls under 18 gave birth in Texas in 2014, the latest year which data is available, according to the Wright Family Foundation, which focuses on education for at-risk youth. Of those pregnancies, nearly 500 were to girls between 10 and 14 years old.

While the number of accusations of sexual assault has climbed in recent years, the number of confirmed cases of abuse have slowly dropped to 5,640 from 5,721 last year, leaving mounds of debunked and unconfirmed cases behind. The last year saw 283 allegations of child sex trafficking, 25 of them confirmed.

"It is a very touchy subject, but we cannot run from the seriousness of this issue," Parker said. "We can't sweep it under the carpet. This is very real."

Andrea Zelinski is a state bureau reporter focusing on education, politics, social issues and the courts. She previously covered the Tennessee legislature and local education for the Nashville Scene where she was news editor. She also wrote for the Nashville Post, the now defunct Nashville City Paper and TNReport news service, covered the Illinois statehouse and reported for the Associated Press and Small Newspaper Group. A Chicago-area native, she has a master’s degree in Public Affairs Reporting from the University of Illinois at Springfield and earned her undergraduate degree at Northeastern Illinois University.